A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERLONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018'The best novel published this year.' Times

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years.

This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person's life - a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us - blazingly - about cycles of domination, legitimacy and privilege. Alternating menace with overwhelming tenderness, Sally Rooney's second novel breathes fiction with new life.

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A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERLONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018'The best novel published this year.' Times

Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years.

This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person's life - a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us - blazingly - about cycles of domination, legitimacy and privilege. Alternating menace with overwhelming tenderness, Sally Rooney's second novel breathes fiction with new life.

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Nuttigste klantenrecensies op Amazon.com

Amazon.com:
4,0 van 5 sterren
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Penny

5,0 van 5 sterrenA masterfully-written novel about young love in the 21st Century

1 oktober 2018 - Gepubliceerd op Amazon.com

Geverifieerde aankoop

Do you ever consider the profound impact significant others have on your life? Decades ago, when our son was toddlerish, my husband and I took him into the country for a weekend. We rented a tiny, Eskom-free stone cottage in a dark valley. One night, with the boy asleep, we sat outside, dazzled by the night sky, and drank a bottle of wine. We’d been a couple for more than a decade by then and somehow began talking about how being together had shaped us as individuals and influenced our life decisions. It was a gentle, but remarkably illuminating discussion for both of us and about both of us. It's a conversation I regularly replay to myself to remember how lucky I am.

I thought a great deal about that night as I read Sally Rooney’s novel, Normal People last week. Normal People tells the story about Marianne and Connell’s relationship, which begins when they’re at school in a small town in West Ireland and continues – on and off – for another four years while they’re at college in Dublin. It’s a tale with so many layers that, while my experience of reading it bordered on compulsive, I find it difficult to analyse – suffice to say that it’s not about the plot; it’s about the characters and their inner lives, and the writing.

Rooney, who is 27-years-old, is widely feted as the next best thing, “one of the most exciting voices to emerge in an already crackerjack new generation of Irish writers”, and a “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”. I don’t dispute the praise. Her writing is extraordinarily elegant. Confident and uncluttered, it conveys an immediacy and ingenuousness that drew me in and held me from beginning to end, which came too soon. The story, I felt – shocked to discover I'd reached the final full stop – was unfinished, there were loose ends to tuck away. But, once I recovered, I realised the way it ends is part of its magic. Real relationships are forever evolving, eternally incomplete, and so it figures that a novel about relationships will be too.

Normal People is told from both Marianne’s and Connell’s points of view. It reminded me how, no matter how well you think you know a person, your perceptions and understanding of what they say and mean can be skewed. The novel also shows how our identity, self-esteem and who we become as adults are bound to our upbringing – indefinitely. Marianne is from a wealthy, but unloving and dysfunctional family. Connell is from a poor, but loving family. It largely shapes who they are and how they relate to the world. The novel also examines the impact of bullying – both on victims and perpetrators.

Ironically, I might not find the book easy to analyse, but I could go on forever, waffling about the many layers in Normal People. I daren’t though because then you might not feel compelled to read the book yourself, which would be a pity. A huge pity. Here’s a tiny sample of the writing to demonstrate what a humungous pity it would be:

“Helen has given Connell a new way to live. It’s as if an impossibly heavy lid has been lifted off his emotional life and suddenly he can breathe fresh air. It is physically possible to type and send a message reading: I love you! It had never seemed possible before, not remotely, but in fact it’s easy. Of course if someone saw the messages he would be embarrassed, but he knows now that this is a normal kind of embarrassment, an almost protective impulse towards a particularly good part of life. He can sit down to dinner with Helen’s parents, he can accompany her to her friends’ parties, he can tolerate the smiling and the exchange of repetitive conversation. He can squeeze her hand while people ask him questions about his future. When she touches him spontaneously, applying a little pressure to his arm, or even reaching to brush a piece of lint off his collar, he feels a rush of pride, and hopes that people are watching them. To be known as her boyfriend plants him firmly in the social world, establishes him as an acceptable person, someone with a particular status, someone whose conversational silences are thoughtful rather than socially awkward."

I’m not sure I feel changed after reading Normal People, but I do feel upgraded. And reminded about how life is a series of relationships, and how a few of them help shape who we are and how we live our lives. And that thinking about that and acknowledging those who positively influence us is important. And yes, Sally Rooney has a fan in me. My current read is her first novel, Conversations with Friends.

I can see the talent here, and it is (sort of) raw, as some readers say. But the perpetual circling, round and round in the same dance, of two people who clearly love each other, without clear reason why they don't admit it and become a pair in their mutual suffering, is repetitive and very tiring. It feels like the author keeps it going simply to keep the book going. I can understand that there's a class issue at the heart of their obstacles (I guess -- it's never dealt with head on, only vaguely mentioned in passing), and a depressive self-loathing that they seem to share, but neither seems reason enough, as they grow older and more mature, and as they lose themselves in college and with other people, to keep them apart. This book is maybe better for younger readers. (I would read her next book, though. Curious where she's headed.)

All the normal people—where do they all come from? In Sally Rooney’s sophomore book, two of these normal wannabes come from small town Carricklea—Marianne, a clever, quixotic, not very cool loner and Connell, the working-class popular kid whose mother cleans house for Marianne’s mother.

The novel is a character study of the two, a dissection of the very meaning of love, an observation of how quickly things change and how difficult it is for things to come together. The reader can see that Marianne and Connell are good for each other but they keep getting in their own way with absurd quarrels and even more absurd other partners. Consider this line about Connell: “He and Marianne are like figure-skaters, improvising their discussions so adeptly and in such perfect synchronization that it surprises them both.” The novel is filled with little gems like that, each succinctly revealing a little more about these (it appears) star-crossed lovers.

As in her sublime Conversations with Friends, Sally Rooney does not shy away from the truth of her characters or whitewash her scenes. Marianne willingly lets – even encourages – Connell to explore her body, only to sense his shame in letting his school chums know that they are “an item.” Marianne excels at Trinity College in Dublin where Connell is the quaint working-class scholarship case

And there continues to be a danse a deux – coming together, pulling apart, almost making it, crashing away, and on and on it goes. We root for these characters, we want them to be happy and we often sigh as they don’t see the forest for the trees. From this point forward, I’ll read anything that Sally Rooney writes.